Emma Bull - Bone Dance

“I can’t afford to believe he hasn’t.”

“I’m staying here.” I managed not to drop my eyes from hers.

“No, you’re not,” she said agreeably.

“They don’t want me. None of them want me. They want you.”

“What I did to you tonight,” she replied, each word evenly spaced and without emphasis, “was nothing. Tom O’Bedlam or anyone who serves him will separate you from your desire to live and any last complacent conviction you may have about the privacy of your own mind as easily as tearing rotted cloth. Knowledge of me will gush out of your brain and your mouth and a hundred other openings that he’ll make just for that purpose. I suggest you come with me.”

“What can I tell him? ‘Well, yeah, there’s this woman, right now she looks like this, but that might have changed; and she wants to bump you off, but you knew that already.’“

“Sparrow,” she said, and stopped, and began again. “It didn’t occur to you that I might have your welfare in mind and not mine?”

I frowned at her, and she returned my gaze, her eyebrows raised. “Why would you?”

“Thank you, I have retained a few dried-out shreds of human decency, I think.”

“That’s not how things work around here.”

It was her turn to frown. “Pretend you’re someplace else, then. Go change, and gather up anything you need, within limits.”

“Where are y—we—going?”

She leaned on the corner of the desk. “Away.”

Do you still have purposes ? Mick had asked. I used mine up. I just move around. I couldn’t go to Dana, obviously; and I couldn’t go to Cassidy, because I didn’t know where that was. If I went to Sherrea, I might involve her—

Oh, no. Think. I already had. Sherrea and Theo, Theo with a hole in him, and at the bottom of the stairs the woman Frances had ridden, Myra, and Dusty, whose craziness had come off him like heat off a griddle. Who’d pointed out, smiling, that now he knew where to find Theo and Sher if he needed them.

“When you… when you rode that red-haired woman out back of the Underbridge. How much of her brain did you pick?”

“Not much. I was busy, you’ll recall. Why?”

I didn’t ask them to get involved. I didn’t ask Theo to follow me out of the building with a gun. He knew better; he’d told me so. “The two people I was with. They were still there…”

Some buttress of self-containment slipped loose, for an instant, behind her face, and was restored just as quickly. “If you’re going to suggest we go back,” she said, “I’ll save you the trouble. No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if it’s not the first place they’ll look, it’s the second.”

“You think Myra and Dusty work for Tom Whatsisname.”

“Worecski.” She sighed. “I didn’t, when I thought you were a better prospect. Whole hours ago. Now I’m forced to confront the notion that I backed, as it were, the wrong horse.”

“They were after Mick Skinner.”

“Were they?” she said, startled. “Why? Do you know?”

“No.” I thought about the confrontation behind the Underbridge, before she’d arrived. “But they knew that he’d—that I’d been him part of the time.”

“Now that would suggest a surprising familiarity with the process, wouldn’t it? Hmm. Go change.”

I did. I locked the door of the bedroom, and felt no more comfortable about it than I’d expected to. Another pair of jeans, another shirt, jungle boots; it didn’t take long. I hid folding money in each boot, and coins in a bag around my neck. When I dropped the cord over my head, I realized there was already something there: Sherrea’s pendant, the two overlapping V shapes. If it was protective, it was doing a rotten job. Maybe it only worked for people who believed it would. What did I believe in? The Deal; it wouldn’t make much of an amulet. I threw a few other things in a rucksack and went to submit myself to the will of Frances.

She looked me up and down. “That must have been a tough decision.”

It was my turn to make my eyes wide. “Would you prefer the evening gown, or the tuxedo?”

Frances gathered up her purloined rifle. I locked the archives and doused all the lights. We rode down to the first floor in silence. Frances, it seemed, was thinking. We got all the way to the tri-wheeler before I finally asked, “Where are we going?”

“To the Underbridge,” she said. “I’ve had second thoughts about renewing my acquaintance with everyone involved. Mount up.”

I looked at her sideways. Frances just smiled.

“The nights are getting shorter,” I shouted over Frances’s shoulder as we rode. “Mind the east.” The sky there was a dense and velvet cobalt, over solid rooftops and shattered ones, over the feeble lamps and torches of the Fair.

“Very nice,” said Frances.

“That means the gates close in an hour or so.”

“It does?”

Well, there; that was one thing I knew that she didn’t. “That’s why they call it the Night Fair.”

“What happens after that?”

“Nothing. Lively as a mausoleum. The hours are shorter in the summer, but it beats staying out in the sun.”

We were threading a narrow, noisy, busy strip of pavement bordered with vendors’ stalls. She braked as a huge, hairy gray dog shot out from between two of them and hurtled across the path, its bony joints rolling. A smooth, loam-black face topped with a brilliantly colored cylinder of a hat thrust itself in front of the windshield. “ Las bujias, senora ,” it said, showing small white teeth and a raised hand full of spark plugs. “ Para todas las mdquinas, senora, y muy baratas –” Frances growled with the throttle, and the face disappeared as we lunged forward. I peered back through the weather shell, and couldn’t find a sign of the bright hat.

“Not to be critical,” I told her, “but if we’d gone to the gate we came in by, we’d have missed the crowds.”

There was a pause before she said, “I was hoping we might find Mick.”

“The place is a warren. We could pass him a dozen times in the next ten minutes and never know it.”

“Ah, but he would,” said Frances harshly. There was a fierce, fruitless rev from the throttle. “Have you noticed many of these here tonight?”

“What if he’s gotten into trouble?”

“In other words, what if he hasn’t come to us because he can’t?” She turned the trike into the mouth of an alley and, to my surprise, killed the engine. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breathing. Finally she said, “We do all want to survive. I’ve been doing it for a long time, in difficult circumstances, and I’ve done it by suspecting everyone unfailingly. I’m afraid it’s a habit now.”

Her habits didn’t account for why we’d stopped here. “Does that mean that you don’t think Mick Skinner is in league with the devil?”

She twisted to look at me. Her eyes didn’t look focused. “Of course I do. I told you, it’s a habit.” She turned away again.

After a moment I said, “If you’ll open the shell, I’ll get some food. The stall’s right there; I’ll be in sight the whole time.”

She didn’t answer, but she groped for and pulled the lever that popped the shell. I scrambled out past her as best I could.

The smell and sound and sight of chicken frying was a swooning sensual overload; I wondered, for an instant, if that was how a caress seemed to most people. I was suddenly vague and giddy with hunger. I had always worked that way: not needing to eat all day, until I needed it desperately, like an engine that runs smoothly through a tank of alcohol and stops without warning when it’s gone. What string of adjectives had Frances hung on me, earlier? Strong, resistant to disease and poisons… She could have added cheap to operate, and rarely needs refueling. I bought chicken (“ Picante ,” the old woman warned, her hands fluttering, her accent terrible, “ picante ”) and fried potatoes and okra and buttermilk biscuits and two long bottles of homemade pear nectar. I tucked the bottles under my arm and juggled the hot paper-wrapped parcels back to the trike.